A Cure for Resurgent TB
Fantastic news the EU has found a cure for TB as proudly announced on their web site
European scientists find novel cure for resurgent TB
Researchers in Belgium have uncovered a novel treatment that promises to be an effective cure for tuberculosis (TB).
The respiratory disease has been experiencing a major global comeback due to the emergence of resistant strains of the bacteria that causes it and the spread of AIDS.
Antibiotic-resistant strains of TB have made current treatments less effective. In addition, the HIV-AIDS epidemic sweeping across many parts of the world is making matters worse since the killer disease often triggers the latent TB which is carried by an estimate one in three of the world’s population.
This has driven up the TB death toll to 2 million people worldwide every year, prompting the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare it a global health crisis. In response to this growing challenge, a team of scientists in Belgium has developed a novel cure for TB which has proved successful on mice and is doing well in preliminary human trials.
North Sea Diaries have been doing a little digging and suggests although not certainly, that perhaps the Commision is claiming this as an EU intuitive is not quite the real story. Perhaps its a Euromyth!
Very good news. And arriving on the Commission’s website, filled with trumpeting about the latest EU-funded démarches, initiatives and programmes, the reader would naturally think the EU is behind it all. “Hello”, one’s supposed to think, “another medical success story for the good old EU”. That impression would be reinforced by the closing paragraph of the press release:
The EU’s Sixth Research Framework Programme is investing large sums in researching the disease and other communicable diseases, such as HIV-AIDS and malaria. In addition, the Union has allocated over €1 billion to fighting these three killer conditions which claim 6 million lives per year.
The sixth framework programme, eh? I’m glad I’m paying my taxes to support an organisation like that, involved in TB breakthroughs and all that.
But a little digging suggests that neither the EU nor its 6th Framework Programme (a system for allocating research funds) were involved in the discovery at all. The Commission is simply trying to take the credit for the breakthrough by vague statements about “European scientists†and its own research which is attempting to achieve the same thing.
Indeed, it turns out that American researchers made a significant contribution to the research. It was a collaborative venture by Johnson & Johnson, Sweden’s Institute for Infectious Disease Control, a French leprosy charity named for Raoul Follereau, the French state, the US company 454 Life Sciences, based in Connecticut, and Maryland’s Institute for Genomic Research.
But you won’t find any acknowledgement in the article that the US was involved, nor privately-funded charities, nor state-run research institutes. Can the EU claim any credit for this at all?
Looking at the sources of funding for the organisations that were involved, and the accounts for the charitable organisations, and J&J’s press releases, and the EU’s sixth framework programme itself, there is no evidence that it can. This is not a definitive no, but it looks very much like it.
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